The invention relates to management of buffers in communications devices that transmit and receive prioritized network traffic.
The IEEE 802.1D Standard describes the use of user priorities and access priorities in a network environment. User priorities are priorities that a user of an application requests be associated with its traffic. Access priorities are the number of differentiated traffic classes that a Media Access Control (MAC) sublayer device provides. The IEEE 802.1D Standard provides a mapping of the user priorities to the traffic classes.
In MAC transceivers that implement access priorities to control channel access, Quality of Service (QoS) performance for the different classes of traffic can be greatly impacted by conventional receive and transmit buffering techniques. For example, the use of the same buffer for multiple access priorities can cause priority blocking to occur, e.g., higher priority traffic is blocked by lower priority traffic. Also, if buffer capacity is limited and buffers become congested, processing of lower priority traffic may be aborted to make way for higher priority traffic.